Tuesday, May 14

Drone Attacks Dishonorable ... J. D. Longstreet

Allow
me to state, up front, I expect to catch a lot of flack for these
comments. But I have a burr under my saddle and I'm going to pluck it
out.

America's use of drones to kill her enemies does not sit well with me. It's distasteful to me and most of all -- it strikes me as being dishonorable.

OK. I have been accused of being a "throwback" to an earlier age, and I won't argue that, at all. I'll go a step farther and tell you that I find little to admire about the current age and still farther to say that -- yes, I remember when America acted with honor both at home and abroad, with her citizens as well as with her enemies.

So
far as I am concerned killing a terrorist with a drone is equal to
placing a bomb beneath his vehicle or shooting him in the back. I don't like either.

I understand that chivalry is dead, long dead. But do we have to shed what little honor we have remaining, as well?
And I understand, too, that looking the enemy in the eye as he slips
his blade between the hapless opponent's ribs is pretty much the work of
our Special Forces these days. Old school? You bet. Effective?
Heck, yes! And ... it is honorable.

I have not been
able to get past the belief that we are choosing to kill our terrorist
enemies rather than capture them and then have to imprison them. Prisoners cost money, lots of money. Dead men in the desert cost nothing -- once the ordinance is dropped on them.

But -- we canLEARN NOTHINGfrom a dead terrorist, either.
No intelligence is gleaned from a dead terrorist. I have to ask --
what might we have learned from the stack of dead bodies littering the
Middle East? Maybe nothing. But now we will never know. Heck, we don't even know what we DON'T know!

Consider this from an article by David Bell in the New Republic entitled: "In Defense of Drones: A Historical Argument" Mr. Bell writes: "With
its explicit embrace of advanced technology over traditional methods of
combat, the strategy seems designed to provoke the increasingly vocal
critics who doubt the morality, effectiveness, and political
implications of “remote control warfare.” Notre Dame law professor Mary
Ellen O’Connell, making the inevitable comparison to video games, has
argued that “to accept killing far from the situation of battlefields
where there is an understanding of necessity is really ethically
troubling.” The Economist, hardly a bastion of radicalism, has similarly
asked: “if war can be waged by one side without any risk to the life
and limb of its combatants, has a vital form of restraint been removed?”
And just last week in The New York Times, Peter W. Singer of the
Brookings Institution called unmanned systems “a technology that removes
the last political barriers to war”—and thereby undermines
democracy—because it allows politicians to take aggressive military
action without having to face the electoral consequences of young
Americans coming home in coffins."SOURCE: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/100113/obama-military-foreign-policy-technology-drones#

Mr. Bell goes on to say: "
... Drones are not cruise missiles, or shells fired by Big Bertha. They
are controllable, and are explicitly designed to allow the military to
target opposing forces as carefully as possible. Of course, targeting
raises its own set of questions: War that takes the form of a campaign
of assassination is both morally problematic and politically
counter-productive." (Emphasis by underlining is mine.) SOURCE: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/100113/obama-military-foreign-policy-technology-drones#

In an article by Akbar Ahmed and Lawrence Wilkerson in "The Guardian" entitled "Dealing remote-control drone death, the US has lost its moral compass," the authors state: "The
warrior ethos may be largely a myth but, like most myths, it protects
something very important: the psychology of killing in the name of the
state. That killing becomes nothing less than murder when the soldier
doing it is utterly invulnerable. Most US citizens, so long divorced
from any responsibility to take up arms and fight and kill, do not
understand this. Soldiers – good ones – do. (Emphasis by underlining is
mine.)Such understanding was behind the recent cancellation by Secretary
of Defense Hagel of the valor award for drone operators."SOURCE:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/drone-death-us-moral-compass

The authors go on to state that the use of drones is making war into murder and creating more problems than it is solving.

Let me be clear here. I am not pleading a case for the terrorists. I am pleading a case for America.

I, too, want the terrorists dead and gone, or at the very least imprisoned. My concern is for the damage we MAY be doing to the soul of America.

In the final analysis, maybe it's just me, as my wife would surely say. Maybe I'm just an old veteran who has grown soft in my waning years. Whatever the answer, I can tell you, without hesitation, that I do not like what America is becoming.

The use of drones instead of living, breathing, soldiers does not sit well, with me. I still prefer the exclamation "Send in the Marines" over "Launch a drone."

But
understand this, America. As long as politicians can wage war without
having to face an angry electorate when those silver coffins begin
arriving at Dover Air Force base, you can bet they will continue to do
it, even increasing the frequency of attacks around the globe. And,
too, as long as the Obama administration's policy is to "lead from the rear" those drones will continue to wreak death and destruction all over the world.

But -- there WILL be "blow back." At some time -- and at some place -- a reckoning will be exacted. We
may find that we are saving American lives through drone usage only to
lose them to the enemy's asymmetrical warfare on our own shores.

No matter what I think, drone technology, and its usage, is here to stay. I, and those who agree with me, will just have to learn to live with it.